The After World
by cityofbones1234
Summary: This is just a story of Jem's perspective of the epilogue of CP2 and after. Rated T just in case. It might be long, it might be short, or it might never get finished, knowing me. I hope you like it. I do not own any of the characters or basic plot. Those belong to Cassandra Clare. Anyway, enjoy!


I saw her from far away, across the bridge. That hair, that scarf: I would know them anywhere, whoever I was. I walked slowly, still not accustomed to the smell of the air, to the immediate flood of feelings and sensations. What if she didn't know me? What if she didn't love me? What if I didn't know her?

Motorcars, going so fast they must be speeding, zoomed past, ruffling my hair and drenching me with the scent of exhaust and gasoline, cigarettes and leather seats. Leaves blew about my feet, tracing patterns that brought back memories of runes, scrawled on golden skin, of Will.

I crossed the lanes of traffic, jogging a bit. I could see her eyes scanning the crowd, gliding over me. Of course. She was looking for the robe, for the white parchment drift of a Silent Brother.

I took a deep breath. Okay, Jem. Time to find out.

"Tessa?" Her name felt sweet in my mouth, unfamiliarly tied with emotions. Hope. Anxiety. Despair. Love.

I saw her freeze. I saw her lift a hand to her head. I saw the bracelet on her wrist, the ring on her finger. I saw her close her eyes and turn away from the railing, away from the river, toward me. A smile broke my features at the sight of her eyes, incredulous and staring. Hope.

I watched her take it in. The lack of a robe, replaced with denim and soft blue cotton. The faded scars on my arms. "Jem?" she whispered, her lips shaking.

I said nothing. The wind cut into my back, but the sun warmed me. I could wait. I saw her register the darker tone of my hair, not like the silver of the boy she had loved, but of the man who had come back. "Jem," she repeated, her voice drawing me closer. "You are" –I heard the hope in her voice – "This is permanent? You are not bound to the Silent Brothers anymore?"

"No." I am free, Tessa, I am free – I breathed deeply. What if she didn't know me? What if she couldn't love me? What if? "I am not."

"The cure – you found it?" Her hands twisted in her scarf, a nervous habit I doubted she was aware of.

"I did not find it myself, " I said slowly. "But – It was found." It was found, and I cannot thank the girl enough. That young one, the Fairchild, the fairy girl. She brought me back.

"I saw Magnus in Alicante only a few months ago We spoke of you. He never said … "

"He didn't know," I explained. "It has been a hard year, a dark year, for Shadowhunters. But out of the blood and the fire, the loss and the sorrow, there have been born some great new changes." I held out my arms, amazed still at the realness of the world. "I myself am changed."

She looked stunned. "How – "

"I will tell you the story of it. Another story of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds. But it will take more than an hour in the telling, and you must be cold." Reflex took over. I moved to put a hand on her shoulder, to bring her, to warm her, but then remembered myself. I backed away.

"I – " She closed her mouth, speechless. Maybe she didn't know how to tell me she couldn't love me. I was wrong to come here. I should leave. I was just about to turn when she said, "But – after today? Where will you go? To Idris?"

I hadn't thought about it. I'd been waiting to be cured until yesterday, and then today I'd come, only thinking that I had to see her. I racked my brain but came up with nothing. "I don't know, " I admitted. "I've never had a lifetime to plan before." It was true. I'd always known I'd die early, but then when I didn't die I thought I'd never live, truly live, every again. But now …

"Then … to another institute?" she asked. I wasn't sure what answer she wanted, but I knew what was true. I would stay with her.

I took a deep breath. "I do not think I will go to Idris, or to an Institute anywhere," I started to explain. "I don't know how to live in the world as a Shadowhunter without Will." Without my other half, my backbone, by _parabatai_, I was lost. "I don't think I even want to. I am still a _parabatai_, but my other half is gone. If I were to go to some Institute and ask them to take me in, I would never forget that. I would never feel whole."

"Then what – "

"That depends on you." There. I'd said it. I held my breath and heard her sharp gasp.

"On me?" Oh, what had I done. I'd scared her. I'd made her feel pressured into loving me. I was a bad influence. I was an evil. I was unprecedented. Oh, Tessa, you never knew I loved you through the glass wall. I couldn't tell you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry …

"I – " I looked down and saw my hands, crisscrossed with scars, clinging to the balustrade. "For a hundred and thirty years every hour of my life has been scheduled. I thought often of what I would do if I were free, if there were ever a cure found. I thought I would bolt immediately, like a bird released from a cage. I had not imagined I would emerge and find the world so changed, so desperate. Subsumed in fire and blood. I wished to survive it, but only for one reason. I wished … " I wished to be with you, Tessa. I wished to live, to love, to follow you, to be the young Jem again. Oh, Tessa …

"What did you wish for?" she prompted gently.

I couldn't answer. I reached out and touched her bracelet, instead. The pearl one, that Will had given her. "This is your thirtieth-anniversary bracelet," I said. "You still wear it." She was still drawn to Will, tied to him. Far from me. I couldn't go with her. I couldn't ask her to do that.

She swallowed. "Yes." Her voice was cool in my mind, distant and unfamiliar.

I spit it out. "Since Will, have you ever loved anyone else?"

"Don't you know the answer to that?" she replied. No, Tessa. Not like that, but like me. Do you love me, Tessa, my love?

"I don't mean the way you love your children, or the way you love your friends. Tessa, you _know_ what I'm asking." Why was she pretending to not know, to be uncertain? How could she make me do this? I was certain she didn't love me. I had to stop, but my mouth betrayed me. She didn't love me.

"I don't," she said. "I think I need you to tell me."

Oh, God, Tessa, you don't know. You don't love me enough to understand. I should leave. Tessa … goodbye.

"We were once to be married," I tried to explain. "And I have loved you all this time – a century and a half. And I know that you loved Will. I saw you together over the years. And I know that that love was so great that it must have made other loves, even the one that we had when we were both so young, seem small and unimportant. You had a whole lifetime of love with him, Tessa. So many years. Children. Memories I cannot hope to – " I stopped. I had to go now. Memories that I could not hope to counter or know stood between us, a solid block of time and separation, of differences and change, of love gone by, love lost to the years. "No," I said, releasing her bracelet. She still loved Will. She could never love me. "I can't do it. I was a fool to think – Tessa, forgive me." I drew away, straightening, plunging into the crowd of people, leaving her forever. Perhaps I could rejoin. There was no use living if she didn't love me. I was lost.

People brushed past me. Strange people, with piercings, tattoos, leather clothes, so different from my world. I lived in the time before the clean river, before bumbling, roaring automobiles prowled the streets and horses were nearly unheard of. Where had those times gone? I was lost, lost in this new world, the world where Tessa lived. I headed back to the Silent City.

What had I been thinking? Will would know what to do. Tessa knew. I never knew. I was like a child, clinging to something I had once known. She didn't know me. I stopped walking, standing at the railing, remembering the visits over the years, the time passing, neither of us changing, neither of us growing old. Will was dead. Tessa's love for me had never been as strong as hers for Will. I was not meant to be here.

Suddenly, a voice cut through the rumble of the new city of London. It was Tess, Tessa come back to haunt me. A hand pulled at my sleeve, jerking me to the present, pulling me around to face its owner.

"Jem," Tessa said, breathing hard from running and flushed from exposure to the biting wind. "What were you trying to ask me, Jem?"

She meant it. My eyes widened. Was this real? Was this a dream? She couldn't possibly be real. "Tessa – you followed me?"

"Of course I followed you. You ran off in the middle of a sentence!" This was the Tessa Gray I knew, refusing to be refused.

"It wasn't a very good sentence, I said. I looked down. Maybe she meant it. I smiled shyly, looking back at her, my beautiful Tess. "I was never the one who was good with words," I tried to explain. "If I had my violin, I would be able to play you what I wanted to say." Will was the one who was good with words. Will was the one she had married.

"Just try," she said, a smile curling her lips.

"I don't – I'm not sure I can. I had six or seven speeches prepared, and I was running through all of them, I think." I had tried to express myself, but music was missing.

Tessa reached out and pulled my hands out of my pockets, gently holding my wrists. "Well, _I_ am good with words, so let me ask you, then," she said kindly.

I let her take my hands. I watched her, still not sure if I was dreaming.

"You asked me if I have loved anyone but Will," Tessa said, her lips trembling. "And the answer is yes. I have loved you. I always have, and I always will."

The breath was forced from my lungs and I gasped. I had never hoped for this, not after … my heart was pounding. She loved me. It was real.

"They say you cannot love two people equally at once," she said. "And perhaps for others that is so. But you and Will – you are not like two ordinary people, two people who might have been jealous of each other, or who would have imagined my love for one of them diminished by my love of the other. You merged your souls when you were both children. I could not have loved Will so much if I had not loved you as well. And I could not love you as I do if I had not loved Will as I did."

I couldn't believe it. Electricity jumped through my hands as she touched them. It had been so long since I'd been touched, since my skin had felt hers. When I was a Silent Brother, we never touched, not even when we met on the bridge. But now, everything was different.

She drew back, and I resisted the impulse to stretch out and touch her, just to make sure she wouldn't disappear. Tessa gently lifted the chain around her elegant throat so that I could see what was on it. A familiar shape caught my eye: the jade pendant, the one my mother had worn, the one I had given to her before, so long before.

"You remember, that you left it with me?" she said. "I've never taken it off."

She had loved it, she had loved me … it was too much. My newly restored emotions threatened to choke me. I closed my eyes, feeling the burn of held back tears. "All these years," I managed to whisper. She cared. "All these years, you wore it? I never knew." Oh, I never knew, Tessa, my dearest Tessa.

"It seemed that it would only have been a burden on you, when you were a silent brother," she said, in her musical voice that seemed so much closer than it had been. So soft. "I feared you might think that my wearing it meant I had some sort of expectation of you. An expectation you could not fulfill."

All this time. The years since my transformation had been long, too long, and yet time had passed differently. The days, the months, the years, had seemed glossed over, no edges, no pain. It might have made me hurt, knowing that she loved me and not being able to help her, knowing that I might never return to her. But now I was back; I was back, and I would never leave her again.

I opened my eyes and looked off of the bridge, at the dark water, cleaner than I remembered. "To be a Silent Brother," I said, trying to put the feeling into words and failing. Will would have been able to. "It is to see everything and nothing all at once. I could see the great map of life, spread out before me. I could see the currents of the world. And human life began to seem a sort of passion play, acted at a distance. When they took the runes from me, when the mantle of the Brotherhood was removed, it was as if I had awoken from a long dream, or as if a shield of glass around me had shattered. I felt everything, all at once, rushing in upon me. That I had so much humanity to return to me … that is because of you. If I had not had you, Tessa, if I had not had these yearly meetings s my anchor and my guide, I do not know if I could have come back." I waited to see what she would say. Would she understand, what it felt like to see her but not to know her? I glanced back to her, searching her eyes.

The tiniest of smiles crept across her lips, and I saw the weight of the years in her eyes. "But you have," came the beautiful whispered music from her lips. "And it is a miracle. And you remember what I once told you about miracles."

Of course I remembered. I remembered everything. I saw the memory clear as day. "'One does not question miracles," I quoted, "or complain that they are not constructed perfectly to one's liking.' I suppose that is true. I wish that I could have come back to you earlier. I wish I were the same boy I was when you loved me, once. I fear that the years have changed me into someone else." Doubt began to creep into my heart again. What if she didn't know me as I really was, now? What if she loved the young, innocent, broken boy, that other Jem Carstairs? What if … ?

Tessa searched my face for something, looking for some hidden thought. She looked young, all of a sudden, though I knew how the years had weighed her down. "The years have changed me, too. I have been a mother and a grandmother, and I have seen those I love die, and seen others be born. You speak of the currents of the world. I have seen them too. If I were still the same girl I was when you knew me first, I would not have been able to speak my heart as freely to you as I just have. I would not be able to ask you what I am about to ask you now."

My heart began to pound. She looked so confident, so beautiful. My hand lifted to cup her cheek. Hope pushed its way onto my face, a sunrise of happiness. "And what is that?"

"Come with me," Tessa said, saving me. "Stay with me. Be with me. See everything with me. I have traveled the world and seen so much, but there is so much more, and no one I would rather see it with than you. I would go everywhere and anywhere with you, Jem Carstairs."

My thumb traced her cheekbone, immortal and mortal, Shadowhunter and warlock. She was the world's greatest marvel, the eighth wonder of the world. She looked like an angel, there on the frozen bridge. "It seems unreal," I managed to say. "I have loved you for so long. How can this be true?"

"It is one of the great truths of my life," she said, smiling. " Will you come with me? For I cannot wait to share the world with you, Jem. There is so much to see."

Oh, yes, Tessa. I will come with you. Oh, Tessa, I love you. I reached out and pulled her close, not worrying about holding too hard, just relieved beyond measure. "Yes, of course, yes," I whispered, smelling the soap and lavender smell that had never changed, not in all of the years. Cautiously, as if doing so would wake me from this dream, I sought her mouth, and her hand reached up, curling in my hair, sending shocks up my spine, lighting fireworks behind my eyes. "_Bie zhao ji_," she whispered. _Don't worry._ She kissed my cheek, the edge of my mouth, and finally my lips, anchoring me to this life and this world, the final straw to keep me from going anywhere else, anywhere without her. I could never make myself leave again. The people kept walking past, but they didn't feel threatening this time, or strange, only people, just people. They seemed insignificant, because the only important thing was Tessa, had always been Tessa. Memory disappeared; the weight of the years flew away, and I was home.


End file.
